and I kind of messed a couple of them so I want to tell you about that story and umm

I wanted to tell you because I think the world of knives is a bit intimidating

and there's a lot to learn and I'm a total newbie to all of this

So I thought bringing you along that journey of learning that I've had

might help someone else who's new to knives and especially Japanese Knives I think

I will make mistakes so I apologize for them I try to learn as much as possible

so if I make mistakes I'm very sorry about that

and this will be kind of a more of a raw unedited video or less edited video so

this is the condition of the knife literally two weeks after I gave it to my sister-in-law

How did it get to that point so quickly?

to get to that I going to have to rewind a bit my wife and I were set to go to Echizen

where among a few traditional crafts they do they hand-craft knives

as my sister-in-law was going to watch our kids while we were away we thought

"one of those knives will be a great gift" especially since she cooks a lot

she was in fact very nervous about owning an expensive knife and told us not to buy her one

umm but when we went to the knife factory

Ryusen Hamono and met with the CEO the knife master we asked him the question of

Can an everyday cook buy and use one of these things? and this is what he had to say

I understand that customers are nervous to use these thin, beautiful knives.

But we make tools to cut food so that you can eat and live,

So please feel free and don't be scared of using one.

We have our clients who have been using our knives for 20 to 30 years.

Some mothers even pass their knives on to their daughters

So with all that in mind my wife and I excitedly spend a couple hours

testing out all these knives you see on this cutting board and ended up

picking a sentoku knife that we felt was best for our needs.

Now I don't know enough about knives to know if this is a laser or not

but what I do know is when you have it and you go to slice it's umm it's really cuts nicely so

Here we go

It's also very lightweight so we liked it sharp, lightweight, What's not to like?

and it was actually the cheapest out of all the knives

the cheapest being about 150USD so we decided to buy one not only for us but for my sister-in-law

and only a week later we both had issues the knives were rusting

ah for my case it was my daughter she was you know cutting up something at night

she left it in a pool of water the next day "oh my goodness it's rusting"

but I looked online and I remembered a video that Jun had about

the rusty knife and fixing it so I looked at that and there was I reddit post attached to it

where somebody told about all the equipment they bought so I got rust erasers and

I got stropping stuff and we got some cream and I was able to

kind of get all the rust out there's a few little kind of like parkmarks left but I think it's

almost almost like new but yeah I did mess it up and recover it but

it was my sister-in-laws knife that was in a lot worse of a coniditon and I'll let her explain

As I always use a stainless knife,

after washing it, I put it in the dish rack.

So I did the same thing with this,

and then I found it rusty,

then we decided to sharpen it,

using an easy one.

My husband used this to sharpen it.

And then it chipped.

So we had a fight...

We thought what should we do, and then came to Greg.

Because what we didn't know and it's a learning curve is that

you know such a hard delicate blade umm you can't sharpen with one of these things or with a

honing steel you need to use wet stones which I now have

but the problem was that he chipped the knife as well as rusted it so it was way beyond my

pay grade to even try to fix

but the words of the CEO of Ryusen Hamono kind of sprang into my mind

If something happens to your knife,

we are here to fix it for you, as our products need to maintain its quality

About the maintenance, you don't always need to send it to us.

We teach you tips so that you can do it by yourself

We are happy to give you advice so it's not difficult at all.

So I shipped it to Ryusen Hamono and not one week later it came back

The fixed knife!

and so we got it back right here so this is the fixed knife now so this is her first time seeing it

so let her open it up and see

Can I say one more thing, sorry.

Because the blade is really thin,

I thought using this would break it,

so I said don't use it, but

my husband said it's OK.

Apparently after one pass through it chipped.

On top of that he didn't even tell me, so it made me mad.

It got all jagged just after it was gifted to us.

Because it got jagged, I was fuming.

OK, I'm done.

- OK, so it's fixed. -Alright.

- Open it please. - Thank you.

Three

Two

One

Open!

Wah! Amazing!

Wow, it's real.

It's like brand new!

- [Mother in background] Did they fix it for you? - [Daughter] Yeah, fantastic.

The chip was here, but it's all fixed!

Yeah, now I feel a different pressure.

I really have to take care of it.

I will treasure it.

Ah, amazing!

This, this.

Supre excellent sharpness!

Stress... it's stress free.

Sugoi!

It's like cutting with a slicer, wow!

Look!

No stress.

It's light as well.

So how do you take care of it now?

- I'll teach you know. - Hai!

- It's easy, it's easy, look. - Yes

- Like this - Yes.

It's OK now.

- Right? - Yeah.

This was the important step to to prevent rusting.

I now understand, thank you so much.

- OK. - I won't let my husband touch this.

- Alright. - I'm done!

Yes, all done!

The Steel

So why did a moderately expensive knife like this rust? Well it's the steel so

on the end of the spectrum you have carbon which can get really sharp and hard but can rust easily

and then on the other hand you have something like this which is considered a stainless steel where

they have a low amount of carbon but a high amount of chromium which makes it stainless

and so this knife is called a umm the metals called HAP-40

and it's kind of like a semi stainless and between so you

can leave it in water for probably an hour and you'll be fine

but if you leave it for a few hours yeah it's going to rust

probably the biggest difference between Japanese knives and western knives is the steel

and the hardness so they're harder then western knives this is a Japanese knife this is a western knife

and umm they're more brittle but like how can you be hard yet more brittle?

like I kind of couldn't wrap my head around it but then I thought about this so

this is a cheap cheap ladle and I'm just going to bang it like this

Right so you can just bend it back right so this is a tough

piece of metal because you can stress it a lot and it won't break but it will bend

right whereas if I take this knife no I'm not going to even try that

this I mean if you did that I think it will break eventually or at least chip

pieces of so it's hard but it's not tough right you can if you stress it enough it will break

and so that's the difference so this type of knife I can abuse it a lot more because it's a softer

steel and it won't break yeah

I hope you can read that

So this is a 180mm cenelli knife it's made in Italy but it's called a Japanese Knife

I guess it's Japanese style and the makeup of the steel is X50 CR MO 14

kind of sounds cryptic but the X50 its stands for X stands for carbon in this case

and it's 0.5% carbon whereas the CR stands for chromium and it's 14% chromium

So carbon makes something hard chromium makes something soft

but the reason you have so much chromium in there is because you want the stainless capabilities

so yeah I could leave this in water overnight and just throw it into the dish pit here

and it will be fine so it can take a lot of abuse

but the hardness takes a hit so on the Rockwell hardness scale it's a 54 to 56

now there's actually a lot elements you can add a knife besides chromium and carbon to make it

do different things so vanadium is one of them so with a wusthof knife what is it it's a X50 Cr MoV 15

is what you'll see written on a wusthof knife I'm probably mispronouncing that sorry Germans umm

but it will get it harder so it's a 58 on the rockwell hardness scale

that's cool and this is a HAP-40 knife and it has a lot more of those hard components in it

umm so carbon is at like 1.3% or 1.4% something around that

it's not that much more but it makes a difference it's also a powdered steel it's like a high speed stool

stool, high speed tool steel

and umm you can get it way harder it's like a 64 to 66 according to the manufacturer

but depending on how you treat it, it can get even harder then that

so the point of a powdered high speed tool steel I believe I'm saying it right

is that umm you can get it harder yet retain some of the toughness but still

even as you know tough as that steel is it's not going to be as tough as this

There are so many different steels I could talk about but the last one I will is this Japanese steel

which is called VG10 and it's supposed to be hard as well as stainless

and umm so it's very popular with Japanese people and it is a 60

on the Rockwell hardness scale

now another thing about this knife is that it has what called damascus

cladding it's not like a damascus knife

all the way through or something like that I believe that technology has been lost to the ages

but damascus cladding you can see this pattern here it means you have soft and hard stainless steel

that are like so many layers I believe this ones 33 layers if I'm correct and

that makes that pattern when you make the knife so it's kind of cool looking

as far as I can tell western knives are lot more standardized and mass produced

now it could just be that I don't know much about knives but Japanese knives seem to have a lot more variety to them

the types of steels that are used and the different types of knives so this is called a

sentoku this is called a nagiri

and there's gyuto and there's just a ton of different styles of Japanese knives

as well as handles you can see this ones octaga~ octagonal

I'll try that again this one is octagonal and this ones kind of octagonal but not quite

it's a really nice handle though beautiful

and as I said before the thing about Japanese knives is because they're harder

they can require different sharpening techniques

and one of the most recommended ones is wet stones

Cutting boards

Now because I got hard Japanese knives this meant that I had to look into cutting boards

because while people want their knives hard

umm you actually want the opposite with your cutting board

you don't want a hard cutting board otherwise it'll dull

your hard knife so plastic cutting boards like

all these ones that I had were not great

umm or I mean you can use them of course but they will dull your knife faster

I should mention though that there are soft plastic and there are hybrids that you can get but

I'm going to just talk about wood and so this is a wood I got from Kochi

and it is a hinoki or cypress and so there are so many different types of woods there's

Maple there's teek there is cypress hinoki and this is called Kiri yeah

and so yeah this cutting board is from Kochi which I actually visited last year

and it's made from a single piece of wood so I believe it'll be less hard to break

then a lamented engrain or edge grain board

although this is a soft wood so it might not last as long for other reasons umm

but so the thing about hinoki which is cypress is that it's a

aromatic wood so in Japanese saunas you'll have this and it's a nice smelling wood oh

there's my cats being fed and versus a hard wood like maple this board is actually quite light

but even lighter is this wood it's a hinoki

and it's not hinoki sorry it's kiri and this wood over here it is super light

umm and I think it has bigger pores so I don't believe it'll last as long

but it was quite popular in the stores when I went around the knife shops in Kappabashi